Wolverine In Exile

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Get the series win against Wiscy and we're in with room to spare. Hoping last weekend was a sign that Wiscy has mentally checked out for the rest of the season. Would really like a sweep to lock in that 3 seed...

Cost is #1 for me. I'm 40 now and grew up in the 80's and 90s. My dad was solidly middle class / hairy envelope edge of upper middle class. He still had the resources to have 6 season tickets for the Lions, split season for the Red Wings with a buddy, and he still took me to 4-6 Tigers games a season and maybe 1 or 2 Michigan football games. I'm much more well off than my dad was by the numbers, but I can't justify going to more than 1 game a year for Michigan football, much less having season tickets-- and I'm a rabid alum fan who had season tix every year in college and three kids I want to turn into Michigan fans. Sure, I have my big TV and it's nice to watch every game, but nothing beats actually going to Michigan Stadium. But I can't because the athletic department had priced me out of it.

Another example, I've been trying to take my kids (my 8 yr old is a hockey nut) to a game at the LCA to watch the Wings this year. Finally got tickets for the Sat 2p game coming up in March and it cost me over $100 / ticket for mid level seats. And the Wings are bad this year. That's just sad. I go to more Tigers games with my kids because I can at least justify the costs of getting tix under $20/piece and the "kids meals" being $5 at the ballpark.

Saturation at the televised level I think affects more the mythos and "specialness" of big events like playoffs, bowl games, and all-star games. Again, as I grew up (in Detroit), seeing Tony Gwynn or Magic Johnson in an all-star game was a REALLY BIG DEAL because in the case of MLB, you didn't see the NL players regularly and even in the NBA you saw the other conference players MAYBE once a year in your home stadium.

All kidding aside, increasing trends like this are interesting to me. Similar things happened in the 1960's with baseball pitching where by the 1968 season, basically all pitching stats were being obliterated (http://www.espn.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=kurkjian_tim&id=6534824) and MLB's solution was to lower the pitching mound. Within a year, offensive statistics were back in line with historical norms and stayed there for another 20 years (until PEDs moved the pendulum way over to the offensive side).

Basketball at the college ranks, if not the NBA, might be soon be making / need to make a similar move by moving back the 3-pt line, and then the team that can exploit the market inefficiency (in this case, I'm guessing the classic "elbow jumper" shooter) will put together a wining streak until others catch up. Remember, the reason the 3-pt shot has exploded is that GM's and coaches realize the math works on shooting more 3's if the percentages stay above a certain level. If you move the line back to where percentages go down on average, you're still going to have your Harden and Curry sharpshooters, but the "stretch 4" and "stretch 5" may become endangered.

The b1g isn't a wasteland this season, so in conference wins will actually BOOST our pairwise instead of being an anchor. I'm not going to go crazy, but with a Cinderella run by a lower team in the conference tourney, this could be a 4 bid league this year.

If he/she says assignments are to be worked independently, then no sharing / collaboration allowed. If they encourage you to work together, then go ahead. It's about following the rules set forth and the Honor Code. And no, everybody does not cheat.

"glitz" of the Nature Boy personna and celebrating his in-ring / professional accomplishments while also showing a balanced view of how that impacted his personal life. I wish they had devoted some more time to his and Triple H's relationship, because that seemed to be a great example of somebody taking the good and bad from Flair's life and learning how to be a better person as a result.

Proposal announced today. One of the key provisions was to eliminate any tax benefits that would derive from public bonds being used for sports stadiums. If true, a lot of these soccer only stadium proposals in multiple cities that are banking on public financing aren't going to be feasible. This may be a move by the Detroit team to get ahead of that issue.

Starting with the PF and the the next three plays where he single handedly destroyed the OL in a different way each time was giving me Reggie White vibes. Yes I said it. Reggie Freaking White. Men that large and strong shouldn't be that nimble and fast

He had the newer style ref hockey pants at the time where it had the wide black sock-like expanding material at the seat seam with nylon pant legs instead of just being all polyester. I want to say it was a game against Northern Michigan with Rick Comley's Prison All-Stars and it being a particularly bad game for Wilkins, he took position against the boards by the student section for a faceoff and went he bent over, I still don't know why I said this, the rink was fairly quiet and I yelled out "Wilkins, why do you have expanding ass pants?". It rang through the entire rink and for the rest of the game whenever there was a faceoff by the student section and Wilkins came over into his position, the entire student section started with a very loud "Expanding Ass Pants [cowbell]" chant. Even the opposition parents fans were cracking up.

My roommate, The Flying Hawaiian, inherited the responsibility of doing the "Dive! Dive! A-ooo-ga" chant from his buddy who was the goalie on the Mitch's Place rec league hockey team. I ended up being the "[GOALIE NAME] Sieve" guy my last two years. Remember fondly when I almost passed out with the Wade Dubliewicz chant since I held his last name for about 20 seconds at the top of my lungs.

Cheapest 3-4 lb beef roast you can find. put in crockpot with one jar of pepperocini / banana pepper rings (brine included), 4-10 cloves of garlic, and 2 cups of beef broth (1 16 oz can, or 16 oz water with 2 buillion cubes) and a little pepper. Cover and set on LOW for 8 hours.

Serve on buns, bread, rolls, tortillas, wraps, rice, noodle, whatever with provolone cheese and a good bottle of gardineira. Save the gravy in the pot for dippin'.

* Melissa and Doug toys are usually really well made and stand up to a lot of abuse. They are more expensive but if this is your first kid, it will last through 1 or 2 others.

* As babies, you want to encourarge movement and inspection. If they're still in the "lay them on their back" mode, a play mat with the hanging toys is good. No real difference in brands or quality there

* Anything you get, be aware it will get in the baby's mouth, so be OK with it being covered in drool / scraped to the core by teething actions

* As the baby starts to move, you need a toy that you can set on the ground and let them play with / crawl around / crawl over, and also a play place you can set them down in (one of the exersaucer play seats or a bouncer that hangs from a doorway) to get stuff done. We have one of the evenflo exersaucers and have used it since our first kid. It has held up remarkably well.

There's not an inherent weakness in running a run n shoot offense with respect to the running game. Look at those Houston Oiler Jack Pardee / Warren Moon teams, specifically the '92 team. Lorenzo White had 1200 yds on 4.6 ypc. The Oilers typically had 2-3 All-pro linemen. The Oilers exploited the hell out of teams that didn't have a good 3rd CB / cover safety and a slower, "thumper" MLB. Spread 'em out, force a team to play their lesser run defenders in order to cover the 4 WR's on the field at all times, and have a RB that knows where a hole is and will hit the hole and run north quickly. Lo White was a great back for those teams, as was Gary Brown in '93. Pardee's team was probably as close to a fully weaponized run n shoot team as the NFL will ever see. The Lions when they fully committed to the run n shoot and had the requisite line in '91 were essentially unstoppable because every trick you could use as a defense to shut down the passing game was mercilessly exploited by Barry Sanders's unique running style.

The Steelers had to basically reinvent the zone blitz defense with hyperathletic (for the time) OLB's and DE's to counter the run n shoot by confusing the QB and WR reads with the different personnel dropping while blitzing with 5 from different angles. That confusion in the read allowed the extra step for the blitzes to get home to the QB and cause sacks or bad throws. The counter by the run n shoot teams was to try and either shorten up the passing game with quicker reads (thereby playing into the defense's hands by taking away options for the QB / WR read combos), or add more shotgun / draw game, which then negated the bigger run n shoot RB (Lo White, Steve Broussard) advantage which was to run downhill while the QB kept the MLB at bay by starting out under center.

Still had the classic boxy look since it was a Sport model and not a Grand. 4.0L 4x4 could still haul ass and felt like a Jeep when you drove it. Loved that car-- wish I had just bought it outright instead of turning it back in after lease.

that Aston Martin in the same color. Took me for a ride in it when I was 10-ish, had the casette player teed up on the James Bond theme for when he started the engine. Of course, he was a Jewish lawyer from Dearborn with a hugely receding hairline, but that didn't stop him.

then I imagine that FIFA will ignore the regional "rules" they've been using to award hosting rights (the so-called rotation) and just award it to the most readily developed area. I could see either a US emergency bid, or even an award to the entire "EU as host nation" with games spread out between Spain, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy. It'd be easier with the EU transit rules, worries about late booking crowds and such would be mitigated if it's spread between 3 -5 land connected countries, and it'd kind of be a middle finger to the UK for Brexit (which I imagine the Euro's and others would unite behind to support). Plus think of all the bribes that could be generated if you got Italy's, Spain's, France's, and Germany's football associations combining forces!

There's a ton of youth hockey, the money's there in terms of locality dollars / donors / potential fan base by volume, and there are a lot of rinks that could fit the bill. Northwestern is exactly the kind of school that could field a college hockey team and be successful, and fund it off of sugar daddies and B1G television revenue. Right now they even have 8 men's and 11 women's teams, so Title IX concerns might not be as big an issue (they have women's fencing as a varsity sport... they could add women's gymnastics or women's crew and probably offset the Men's hockey adds). Otherwise Nebraska and Iowa are probably the best bets (unless you really believe that Illinois can capitalize on the Chicago AND St Louis connections).

FWIW- The Cincy arena Brian must be referencing is US Bank Arena on the riverfront. It's a 18k person arena true, but you can tarp off the upper deck to reduce capacity and the place still "feels" small after attending a number of concerts there. Cincinnati also used to have the old Cincinnati Gardens which was north of the UC campus by about 5 miles and 3 miles away from Xavier. The Gardens would've been perfect for a college program (used to host the multiple Cincy AHL / minor league teams), but it really deteriorated the last couple years and is now up for demolition. Univ of Dayton and Wright State Univ were looking into D-I jumps a couple years ago using the Nutter Center on Wright St's campus or adding some seating to the Kettering Ice Arena about halfway between the two campuses, but they couldn't get the state to kick in funding.

But I went from DirecTV and Xfinity in succesive years to a cord cutting option of:

- Xfinity high speed internet ($40/mo)

- Sony Playstation VUE mid range subscription ($35/mo). Gets me all the local stations, all the sports networks I care about (ESPN/2/News/U, BTN+alternates, regional Fox Sports, FS1, NFL Network, NBA TV, NBC Sports), and most of the good cable staions (Viacomm networks liek Nick, MTV, Comedy Central were taken off late last year in a fees dispute with Sony). Allows up to 5 devices streaming from the same account login. Also has limited DVR capability via cloud services

- Amazon Fire TV box w/ game controller ($99), 2 Fire TV sticks ($30 each). I also have Amazon Prime, so I get access to all the Prime Video content (which is starting to be really good with Grand Tour, The Tick upcoming, Man inthe High Castle, and their Tv / movie archive is pretty good)

- Bought my own router so I didn't have to rent one from Xfinity ($100 sale).

I'm on about 8 months on the service and couldn't be happier. I still can see all the shows I care about and my monthly recurring costs are about $75/month. Highly recommend Playstation Vue over Sling and DirecTVNow for the better live local channel and sports content for the price, but if DirecTV Now figures out a DVR service, local channel solution I may switch just 'cause of the $5 HBO subscription and the AT&T free data benefits.

I keep my wings at about 250 deg F with just a simple salt and pepper dusting before they go in and after 3 hr, they're perfectly crispy on the outside and done on the inside. I then break out the tupperware containers with my favorite sauce and spin 'em up. My wife will never let me cook wings a different way again.